Late 19th century, originally dialectal northern English, from a euphemistic alteration ofhell.[1][2]
heck
- (euphemistic)Hell.
Heck, what did I expect? It's too muddy out to go biking today.
heck (uncountable)
- (euphemistic)Hell.
You can go toheck as far as I'm concerned.
2024 March 20, Richard Foster, “Vital experience in an open-air classroom”, inRAIL, number1005, page57:"And the railway industry needs aheck of a lot of people to be up-skilled," notes Darroch.
- Heck usually only replaceshell in idiomatic expressions or as a generic intensifier or vulgarity. It is only rarely, and for intentionally jocular effect, used as a euphemism for the actual concept of hell.
Blend ofto heck(“destroyed, messed up”) +fuck, possibly supported byfeck.
heck (third-person singular simple presenthecks,present participlehecking,simple past and past participlehecked)(informal)
- tobreak, todestroy
- Synonyms:fuck,bork
- tomess up
Seehatch(“a half door”).
heck (pluralhecks)
- Thebolt orlatch of adoor.
- Arack forcattle tofeed at.
- (obsolete) A door, especially one partly oflatticework.
- A latticework contrivance for catchingfish.
- (weaving) An apparatus for separating the threads ofwarps into sets, as they are wound upon the reel from thebobbins, in a warping machine.
- Synonym:heck-box
- Abend orwinding of astream.
- ^James A. H. Murrayet al., editors (1884–1928), “Heck”, inA New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford English Dictionary), London:Clarendon Press,→OCLC.
- ^Wright, Joseph (1902),The English Dialect Dictionary[1], volume 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page125
- “heck”, inWebster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.:G. & C. Merriam,1913,→OCLC.
- William Dwight Whitney,Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “heck”, inThe Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.:The Century Co.,→OCLC.
- “heck”, inOneLook Dictionary Search.
heck
- singularimperative ofhecken
- (colloquial)first-personsingularpresent ofhecken
heck
- alternative form ofhacche
